Press Releases

Award Recognizes Achievements in Health Services Research

03/30/2007

Flaura Koplin-Winston, M.D., Ph.D., has been named a recipient of an AcademyHealth Health Services Research (HSR) Impact Award for her efforts to protect children from injury and death in vehicle accidents. Dr. Winston is the founder and scientific director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention, and executive director of Partners for Child Passenger Safety (PCPS), a research alliance between The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm.

The Academy's HSR Impact Award was created to recognize research that has had a significant impact on health and health care. The award is intended to "identify examples of outstanding research that have been successfully translated into health policy, management, or clinical practice."

Dr. Winston received the award for her research that underscores the need for improved public education campaigns to increase appropriate car sear use, particularly among those families at highest risk for crash injury. PCPS studies have demonstrated that using age- and size-appropriate child restraints can reduce the risk of injury to children resulting from a motor vehicle crash to less than one percent.

Dr. Winston's research has resulted in upgrades to child restraint laws in 38 states to include requirements for booster seats as well as two federal laws on child restraint systems. Her research has revealed the severe consequences of not using age-appropriate child restraints, provided concrete evidence of the value of back-row seating for children under 12 years of age, determined the effectiveness of enhanced air bag technology to minimize risk to front-seated children and provided guidance to consumers to not have children side-seated in the extended cab area of compact pickup trucks.

In addition, she and her team conducted educational, public health, and media campaigns to promote appropriate restraint and created an interactive Web site for parents in English and in Spanish. Due to these efforts, appropriate restraint use by children between the ages of 3 and 7 has doubled between 1999 and 2003 and child occupant fatality is at the lowest level ever, 15 percent lower than in 1990.

The HSR Impact Award honors outstanding research that has been successfully translated into health policy, management or clinical practice. AcademyHealth is a professional society for researchers, businesspeople, economists, policy-makers and others who influence health services. For more information about the award visit: http://www.academyhealth.org/awards/hsrimpacts.htm.